Text communication using electronic devices has been widely used for a considerable length of time. Electronic mail and instant messaging between computers are very widely available, and widely used. In addition, portable wireless electronic devices, such as cellular telephones, have adopted instant messaging techniques both for the delivery of email and for delivery of instant messages originating from another cellular telephone or some other wireless device. One extremely popular technique used by cellular telephone systems for message delivery is short messaging service, or SMS. SMS messages are typically relatively short and are often subject to a specified character limit. They are typically delivered as nearly instantaneously as possible.
As text messaging in cellular telephones and similar devices gains in popularity, users who employ such services regularly can expect to receive more and more such messages. Receiving and dealing with a text message requires time and attention from the user. Some messages, such as bulk commercial messages about products in which a user has no interest, are not desired at all. Other messages may be of great interest to a user, so that a user wishes to give them priority over other messages. Still other messages may be of interest, but may be of a lower priority for a user, so that the user would like to be able to defer their delivery to a desired time window. Numerous other ways of managing messages would be of interest to users, provided that messages could be reliably classified in ways corresponding to the interest they were likely to hold for a particular user.